April 12th 2008
Why care about a local business search strategy? Because 40% of people are now using local search and this figure is increasing rapidly. Here are a few tips...
1. Your Goals, Your Customers Goals
Ask yourself these questions:
What's in the mind of your ideal customer?
What causes them to need what you have?
What do they type into the search box?
What do you want that customer to do when they find you online? Do you want their name and email for an email list? Do you want them to pick up the phone to call you? Or is it to buy something?
2. Explore the Local Search environment
Observe the results that come up for local searches (go to www.google.co.uk and search, for example ‘london dry cleaner’).
The results page is slightly different to the normal results page because Google recognises you typed the name of a City. On the left side you see a map of central London with coloured ‘pins’ representing the locations of the companies returned by the search results. Links to the companies’ sites are to the right of the map.
Alternatively you can go directly to Google’s local search engine by typing www.local.google.co.uk which share’s its interface with Google Maps. Click on the ‘Find Businesses’ tab and enter the same search terms.
3. Research Keywords
Write down a short list of seed keywords for your business. What is central to what you do? Ask your clients and friends what are the core keywords that they would type into search for your service, e.g.
Dry cleaners london
Dry cleaners
Launderette
London cleaner
Laundry
Clothing repairs
Clothing alterations
Stain removal
Service washes
Wedding dresses
Try and find around ten keywords/key phrases of between one and five words, and add common miss-spellings. Expand your seed list to what people are actually typing in by using the following tool:-
4. Determining your Tags
Divide your keywords into five or so categories (Tags aka ‘categories’ will be used later for use in blogging and social network sites):-
Dry Cleaning
Stain Removal
Ironing Service
Service Washes
Clothing Repairs
5. Itemise your locations
Think about your target locations – where are your customers? Make a note of all the counties, cities, postcodes and area names, for example:
Middlesex, London, W1, WC1, Soho, Mayfair etc.
6. Setting up your local search Accounts
Go to www.local.google.co.uk and open an account. You can add all sorts of information here including testimonials, reviews, special offer coupons etc. Take time to familiarise yourself with the interface, look at the help videos. Pepper your best keywords into everything you write. Upload a good picture of your business, your logo, your people etc. You can also setup accounts at Yahoo Local and MSN Local – do this after you have mastered Google!
7. ‘Web 2.0’ your content
Write or commission articles in the 'How To' style between 500 to 800 words. Find websites that allow you to put this content (in the format they are asking for) on their servers. Pepper the articles with keywords and links to something else you have (e.g. your website pages). Calls to action should be added to all these articles - Free reports, Special Offers etc. The actual text in the link should be your keywords, and it should link to a page that relates to that topic. If you are purchasing non-unique content, make sure you modify the article so that it is at least 25% different. Google does not like duplicated content.
You can use the following sites for Web2.0-ing your content:
For creating pages on anything you are passionate about – in this case subjects your customers are interested in
Similar to squidoo.
www.swicki.com
Let’s you create your own mini search engine on topics related to your business that you are expert in.
www.youtube.co.uk
Allows you to host your business related videos, e.g. ‘How to fold a T-Shirt’ would be a teaser for your Dry Cleaning Company, with a link to your website for a special offer. Will ask you to specify your ‘Tag’ as mentioned above.
www.veoh.com
Similar to You Tube.
www.base.google.com
Create links between your web content. E.g. get your squidoo to link to your blog, your blog to link to your hubpage, on hubpage link to your swicki, on swicki link to whatever, but don't do direct link exchanges between any two of them. Have some of them link to your website/landing page for conversion. Don't exchange links - it doesn't work anymore - what's important is what authoritative sites link to you without you linking back. Don’t think of your webpage only - you want to drive traffic to any webpage that is about you i.e. that contains your company’s details.
8. Blogs
Warning! Don’t start a blog unless you can commit to posting something weekly, say one to four paragraphs. Blogs are online diaries; you can use either of these to get a blog running within 15 minutes.
www.wordpress.com
or
www.blogger.com
Blog posts with each keyword on your list (one keyword/phrase per post). Rotate the keywords/phrases with all your articles. Ensure that there is a call to action for each article. Don’t always link to the website home page – mix it up a little and link into detail pages. The blog subject line should have keywords from your keyword lists and also your Tags which the blog will ask for to help categorise your content.
9. Website
This is just a piece of the jigsaw puzzle, remember that your content can be distributed across many websites, each linking into your own website. Optimise your keywords and think of each and every page as a landing page - a goal, something for the customer to do, an offer. Description & Keyword tags should be populated. The Title tag is very important - every title for each page should be different, peppered with keywords and worded in a way that makes people want to click on it.
A note on Flash: Flash is invisible to Google. Use only on part of your site/page if at all. Don't create an entire site in Flash if you want it to list highly in Google!
10. Social Bookmarking
Go to www.addthis.com and set up an account . Provides you with a code snippet that you can add to your website or blog which allows your content to be publicly bookmarked - another external link to your site which helps with your search engine results.
Bookmark your blog, your website, your squidoo page etc...Your bookmark page will be found in search results. Name your bookmark list something search-friendly, e.g. ‘Top 10 Dry Cleaning Tips’.